promt: just a photo burning
by flowered
Summary: Sirius/remus goodbye


When Sirius sees Remus running toward the cage, running toward him with his face distorted in rage and hurt and his wand out, he looks down at his feet and wills his eyes to dry so he can harden himself for this final, deafening insult. A crack, a fizzle, a curse hits the enchanted cage and bounces off with a hiss and a shimmer and Remus is screaming even as two aurors chase him. Remus wears a shabby tweed suit that has two holes in the knees and a large, dark stain across one lapel. His face is grizzly and haggard and the soles of his shoes barely exist, like something second hand and sad - he doesn't wear socks. Sirius doesn't want to remember him this way, doesn't want to remember that it had been Sirius himself who had had Remus thrown out of The Order's headquarters on mistrust and rumors two months before. That Remus had been shunned by both sides and had been barely existing, barely getting by, barely surviving.

And now James and Lily are dead.

"I'll kill him!" Remus is screaming, even as one of the aurors tackles him and his full weight falls on Remus's back and the two of them hit the ground together, hard, his wand clattering against the asphault. Sirius laces his fingers through the cage and finally looks up. Remus's chin scrapes the ground and he throws his elbows into the auror, trying desperatly to get his wand. Sirius forces himself to look into Moony's face. When their eyes meet Remus's hands stop scrambling at the ground for his wand, his nails caked with dirt and his hands covered in new, red scars. Both of their faces look a decade too old. Sirius almost thinks, if he squints, that this can't be Remus. It is someone else clammoring for his head, someone else who is aged and ruined for the new world that had been forged with spilled blood, forsaken friendships and love lost. Not Moony. Moony is in gryffindor tower, reading some homey, thick volume by Eliot or Hemingway, a bar of bavarian creme chocolate in one hand and an admonishing look to his left every so often when Sirius kisses his shoulder and begs for attention and the entire world is before them, and they will make all of the right choices. That is where they exist, _then_. Not here, _now_. Not on a stinking pier with the atlantic stretching out hard for hundreds of miles and cage bars and betrayal between them and a best friend dead and in the ground.

Their stories can't end like this, so it has to be someone else that thrusts his finger out, his eyes bloodshot and his hair shaggy and his teeth bared like an animal under an impassive, uncaring half-moon. And it is another man who throws his head back and screams into the madness and someone else being buried in Godrics Hollow because James and Sirius and Remus go on existing and they never grow up; Messrs Padfoot, Prongs and Moony and the end does not come this way for marauders. They exist like a homage to the end of an era, like nearly headless nick, haunting the halls of hogwarts, like cycling magic photos that strut and prank and laugh, forever.

But no, Sirius knows that isn't true, either. One of the aurors hauls Remus up by his arm and begins to drag him away, his feet kicking the slick ground in refusal to be led away, and Sirius shoves his fingers through the bars further because that is Remus, there, and this is him, and this is the last time they will ever see one another; he can only fit two fingers through each square and they look awkward reaching out those few inches. Remus cranes his neck as far around as he can, still thrashing his limbs with any freedom the aurors relax upon him in the passing seconds and his face is covered in tears and Sirius, although his beating blood drowns out the noise of the word, can read Remus's lips, _why_?, he asks._ Why_? he screams, his hands going slack in the aurors grasp, finally, his entire body slumping as they carry his full weight and Sirius reaches out with his mashed-together fingers because if he can just reach Remus, if he can just have one kindness, one thing to hold onto against the impending end. One bright light at the end of a tunnel.

"**_Avada kedavra_**!" Remus is screaming, over and over, wandlessly, weakly, willing wordless magic to work for him as he claws at his face and tears at his hair but the spells are only half-committed and they deflect off the the warded cage with pops and crunches that shock Sirius so hard that he steps back, pulling his fingers back through the bars to tremble in the air.

.

.

_It is their last hoorah. The hogwarts express looms silently and other students already board in excited beginning-of-the-summer bursts but Sirius, Remus, Pete and James all hang back. Remus leans against a post, his hands behind his back, inhaling the air with a wistful expression floating across his face. Peter sits in the dirt, picking at one of his nails with no clear inclination of emotion about their last trainride from Hogwarts. James and Sirius are in lazy competition to see who can keep a deflated quiditch ball off of the ground the longest, a jumble of random jerks and kicks and near-misses that inevitably end badly for Sirius when Lisa Mchannon calls goodbye from the rails before she disappears inside the train, causing him to jerk his head up and the ball to hit him in the face before flopping down onto the ground. James raises his arms in silent victory and Pete awkwardly claps for him while standing, brushing his pants off. The train blows a low, mournful whistle of warning and the four of them look at one another - an emotion ripples through - indefinable and soft so that there is no way for any of them to vocalize it, men such as they are. An emotion about leaving the only home they've known for seven years, facing the world without the comfort of one another dubiously at each's side, of making their own way. Finally Sirius gathers James and Remus up into his arms and James throws his arm over Peter and the four of them trudge toward the express._

_"This isn't goodbye," Sirius says, as if to the group but really to himself, to the tiny things that echo in his head. "Why, we're all having butterbeers at the order tomorrow night, this is more of a beginning than an end."_

_Remus turns his head and fixes Sirius with a long stare as they come upon the train, and when Sirius finally looks back at him he just smiles, and nods. He wants to say something prolific about beginnings and endings and friendships but, he thinks, it is all sobering and bleak and he wants pads to enjoy the train ride back to London._

_._

_._

Remus's entire body is on fire and he throws one hand across the floorboard, his nails scratching into the dirt and the wood like some cobbling, dieing thing in it's final moments. Outside the moon looms full, bright, and cruel. The room is on the ouskirts of some place that is damned and dead from the war. Even with wolfbayne the transformation was searing and unforgiving, the stuff of nightmares to be lived again and again. This particular transformation seems worse, seems like something dredged up from memory of what it had been like, once; certainly he'd had to do this alone before in his life, he knows that, but had become so accustomed to that black dog panting in the corner, to the kind of companionship that those 17th century authors he so loves could only create from imagination for their immortal works. He had had the real thing. But real things were like Shakespeare, king lear in his madness and ophelia sinking below the surface.

He contorts, the sound of his bones starting to break and grow and reform and his breath is labored; some nights he thinks he might die from the process itself. Some nights he prays not to wake up.

There is smoldering ash in the fireplace, the remains of a few cardboard box corners that had been home to his memories from hogwarts, stupid things he had saved. It was too hard to drag them from hovel to hovel, these days, and anyway, the fire had seemed more appropriate. As the shadows dance along the walls, elongate, and snarl one half burnt photo flutters from the fire by an unseen draft. Three boys smile together with their arms thrown round each other. The photo friends shift and smile and a big black dog leaps into the shot to knock all three to the ground in a tangle of limbs and laughter. It recycles, playing again and again, one memory stuck on repeat. The back corner, seared, reads_ Hogwarts, 74'_. The ghosting draft fans the red embers on the edge of the photo and the heat bubbles the remaining portion of the photo's charmed emulsion, and the burn spreads slowly.


End file.
